What causes depression?

Is it poor diet, difficult life events, problems in relationships, your genetic makeup, a lack of meaning in life, or perhaps a biological imbalance? The truth is, all of these factors (and dozens more) can play a role. Understanding the risk factors operating in your own case can help you to choose between the many recommended strategies for dealing with your own depression.

In Part One of Your Depression Map, readers are invited to explore their own symptoms and risk factors, and to move from these to a treatment strategy tailored to them. Though not intended as a substitute for professional care, the exercises and recommendations can help you identify the self-directed coping techniques likely to be most helpful for you. The book is organized around a model of depression called the Depression Map: a set of nine interacting areas of your own life that can contribute to mood problems. The nine realms, or nodes, of the Depression Map are: History, Biology, Physiology, Emotion, Thought, Behavior, Situation, Social Concerns, and Meaning.

Part Two of the book presents 76 separate strategies for coping with depression. No one will ever use all 76, but understanding the nature of your own depression will help you pick the most promising ones. Some strategies are recommended for everyone; while others are just for special instances. Website content includes:

Table of Contents - The chapter titles from the book.

Excerpt - From the Introduction, several segments selected to give you an idea what the book is about. Now available.

Forms and measures - Downloadable copies of many of the diagrams and forms from the book. Now available.

Purchase information - Where and how to get copies of the book. Now available.

In Part One, Finding the Path, the nature of depression is discussed. Readers are invited to consider their own mood difficulties in terms of a) their symptoms, and b) the risk factors that seem to have been operating in their own case. This section concludes with a questionnaire designed to help the reader identify the areas to target most strongly with their coping strategies.

Part Two, The Journey, presents the strategies themselves. Each general area is broken down into a series of up to 13 specific strategies. Readers are encouraged not to try them all, but to prioritize based on the specifics of their own life and their own mood problem. Part Two concludes with a chapter on preventing relapse.